Apple iPhone will succeed despite late, defensive move

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt

An article from Bloomberg News columnist, Matthew Lynn, suggests the “Apple iPhone will fail in a late, defensive move”. Nothing could be further from the truth!

Lynn’s online article, which is worth reading, lists in detail three reasons why he thinks Apple’s iPhone will fail.
The first reason is that “Not everyone is sold on the idea”, meaning that not everyone thinks the iPhone is going to be successful. Apple is late to the phone party, competing phone companies will defend their turf, and there are already strong relationships between existing mobile phone vendors and mobile network operators.
The second reason is “Network Opposition”. Here Lynn says that companies like Nokia will be offering big incentives to the mobile network operators not to do a deal with Apple.
The third reason is that “the iPhone is a defensive product”. Lynn says it is to defend the iPod, because phone manufacturers are putting music players into their phones, and that “defensive products don’t usually work” because they are reheated versions of old things.
Lynn says more than this in case you are interested in reading it, but in short, how wrong can Lynn be?
To start with the first reason, that “not everyone is sold on the idea”. Well, of course not! I can’t see Microsoft, Nokia, Sony Erisscon, Motorola, Samsung or any other mobile company being tremendously overjoyed with the prospect of having to deal with the iPhone, whether it’s an expensive phone or not.
The iPhone isn’t just a phone anyway, but what appears to essentially be a fully powered computer, albeit with applications that we’ll have to buy from Apple direct since Jobs decided he wanted to ensure the quality of apps that are available for the iPhone. This is so your iPhone doesn’t freeze up because someone wrote a poorly written app. It’s also what happens with any games console, where games go through a proper licensing and quality control process and are written with agreed guidelines.
The demonstration we saw of the iPhone, and people’s reactions who were able to spend some time with an iPhone, showed us that the interface truly is leaps and bounds ahead of anyone else at the moment. So, the fact that “not everyone is sold on the idea” of an iPhone may well be true, it is not something that you can extrapolate failure for the iPhone from. There’s no one product that everyone is sold on – that’s why there are so many different brands, and why there is so much choice in the modern world.